Language Into Practice

Language into Practice

Classroom observations can reveal many things about how students are learning. More specifically, observations can expose much about the student’s struggles with language, society and culture respectively. Our classroom observation site is an after-school outreach program called HOLA. The program is specifically designed for the students within the Rampart community of Los Angeles to offer those programs that are not typically offered at the local schools. We are assigned to a general music class consisting of 3rd and 4th graders with varying levels of conversational English. Through observations, we found that the importance of understanding specific theories of language acquisition is imperative to teaching because of the various cognitive elements that can influence the student’s second language acquisition.
The students in the class we are observing are mostly within the ages 9 and 10. Only one of the students   is 11 years old. This means that they are still in the Concrete Operational stage of Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development. During this level of development, students are able to solve concrete (hands on) problems logically (Woolfolk, 2007). In addition to concrete problem solving, Wolfolk further explains "The basic characteristics of the stage are the recognition of the logical stability of the physical world, the realization that elements can be changed or transformed and still conserve many of their original characteristics" (p.32).During this time, children gain a better understanding of mental operations.   Children begin to think logically about concrete events, but have difficulty understanding abstract or hypothetical concepts.
All of the students in the class speak Spanish. Since our class size is small, we were fortunate enough to meet most of the parents. As we suspected based upon the students knowledge of English, all the parents we   met spoke very little English if any. From our brief conversations with...